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27/06/2026 1:16 pm
TL;DR: Deepfake technology is increasing the credibility of phishing, disinformation, and social engineering by making manipulated audio and video harder to distinguish from authentic content, according to Abnormal AI’s on-demand webinar with Mike Britton and Tyler Cohen Wood. The trust problem now extends beyond fraud response into identity verification, executive protection, and approval workflows.
NHIMG editorial — here’s why we think this discussion matters
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations verify requests when deepfakes can imitate trusted people?
A: Organisations should require a second, authenticated channel for any high-impact request.
Q: Why do deepfakes create an identity governance problem as well as a fraud problem?
A: Deepfakes attack the trust signals that identity workflows depend on, including executive approval, contact verification, and user education.
Practitioner guidance
- Add higher-assurance verification for high-impact requests Require separate confirmation channels for payments, access changes, executive requests, and incident approvals when voice or video is the trigger.
- Redesign awareness training around synthetic impersonation Update phishing simulations and executive protection drills to include deepfake voice, video, and text scenarios.
- Set response thresholds for suspected synthetic media Define when a suspicious clip, call, or recording must be escalated for review, preserved as evidence, and blocked from driving a business action.
What to expect at the briefing
Abnormal AI's full webinar covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Live discussion of how deepfakes have evolved and the specific cybercrime use cases they now enable.
- Panel insights from Mike Britton and Tyler Cohen Wood on disinformation, politics, and national security.
- Guidance on AI-driven detection approaches and how defenders can apply them against synthetic media threats.
- On-demand access with ISC2 CPE eligibility for teams that need continuing-education credit.
👉 Watch Abnormal AI's on-demand webinar on deepfakes and cybercrime →
Deepfakes and digital trust: what IAM teams need to watch?
Explore further
27/06/2026 2:33 pm
Deepfakes are a human identity and trust problem before they are a media problem. The central risk is not simply that content can be faked, but that people and workflows still use voice, video, and likeness as trust shortcuts. That means phishing defence, executive verification, and awareness training now overlap more closely with identity governance. Practitioners should stop treating synthetic media as a niche awareness topic and treat it as an authentication-adjacent risk.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- 38% have no or low visibility and a further 47% have only partial visibility into those connected vendors, according to the same report.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How can organisations reduce the risk of deepfake-driven social engineering?
A: They can reduce risk by combining user education, high-assurance verification, approval segregation, and incident escalation rules. The goal is to make it difficult for a convincing fake to move directly from perception to action. Any process that depends on belief alone is too easy to exploit.
👉 Read our full editorial: Deepfakes are reshaping cybercrime and trust in digital identity
